As is habit, this is the place where I tell you about some of the stuff I did this weekend; the amount of stuff being not inconsiderable this time around.

Friday was relatively low-key. Having some soon-to-expire travel comp time, I made it a half day at work after a busy week of testing, briefing the CIO, and wrestling with issues, because I deserve it, and I’d rather use the leave rather than have it disappear. Day was rather uneventful otherwise.

Saturday, however, was a bit different. I met a bunch of friends in the morning down along the canal walk in Richmond, where we biked in caravan for a section of the Virginia Capital Trail which opened up last year, and runs from Richmond to Williamsburg. We put down about 25 miles total, with a stop for lunch at Ronnie’s BBQ in the middle, and a celebratory pint at 7 Hills Brewing Company at the back end. It was a really nice day after a week of seemingly never-ending rain. We hit a few sprinkles after lunch, but they were light and short, and actually served to cool us off a bit more than anything else.

My biggest surprise was that I managed to stay nicely middle-of-the-pack (I had no chance of keeping up with the “career cyclists” who routinely pull century rides) for not getting much wheel time in recently. I was proud of my performance at any rate; starting the season when you’re a bit out of shape right off with a 25 miler isn’t exactly easy. Doesn’t stop my back side from complaining after ten miles, but that’s mostly due to my noassatall diagnosis.

Saturday evening (after a welcome shower and a change of clothes), Colleen and I got out of the house for a few hours (because we deserved it, and because the kids needed some time to prep holiday surprises) and caught a screening of Captain America: Civil War. I’ll leave spoilers out of it for now (though based on the box office, I expect a lot of you reading this have probably already seen it), but it was damned good, balancing all those Avengers characters (they were pretty much all in there save one or two) much more successfully than Age of Ultron did (though I’m sure there’s 20 minutes of that movie that got cut that we’ll never see), introduced two new ones, and still kept the story coherent, the stakes real and personal, and the experience completely entertaining. Also, they found a way to work in Cap’s semi-iconic “No, you move.” speech from the (admittedly flawed*) source comics in a clever and unexpected way, which was a much appreciated nod to the source material.

Black Panther and Spider-Man were great additions; both had nice character arcs, and they didn’t belabor origin stories; they just picked up with both of them, in media res, dispensing with backstory in a few lines of dialogue (though they leaned a bit on pretty much everybody being passingly familiar with Peter’s spider-bite origin given the five films and two, now three, different actors over the last decade and a half). I gotta say, I loved the treatment and characterization of Spidey; Tom Holland nailed the part, and Marvel’s effortless presentation made us wonder why Sony and their Spider-teams had so much difficulty getting it right to begin with. I am looking forward to both the Black Panther and Spider-Man films coming in the next few years.

And Sunday, the kids nailed those German Chocolate cupcakes.

This week? Lots of musical rehearsal (I’m backing an abbreviated production of Godspell this weekend, and that project I alluded to a little while ago is getting together to run some tunes), software testing at work, and…you know…life.

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*-yes, the Civil War comics event was seriously flawed, because it required all the characters to be much stupider (and occasionally fascist) than they’d been characterized for the last 40 or 50 years in order for the story to work. Some of that stuff was still present in the movie as well (especially on Cap’s part), though both Cap and Iron Man were both more or less in line, in broad terms, with their characterization as presented in the Marvel movies since 2008. The movie people did the best they could, I think, in making the somewhat ridiculous source material work within the frame they’d set up for themselves. They got their second act phase downer ending leading into Phase three, and now that they’ve gotten Civil War out of their system, they can put it behind them.